From October 10-18, 2015, Emissaries from the Future will create Imagination Stations nationwide, popping up in parks, classrooms, galleries, conferences, farmer’s markets and beyond for this large-scale act of collective imagination. Using creative tactics, Emissaries will engage people in envisioning the world they hope to inhabit and—looking back from the future—celebrating the work they did to get there. The resulting texts, images, videos, and more will be uploaded to an online platform, yielding a crowd-sourced vision of the future, inspiring art, policy, and community action.

In these times, exercising social imagination is a radical and necessary act, shifting dominant narratives and affirming that all of us make the future. Too often, we’ve been persuaded to believe our voices don’t count or that the future is determined by a powerful few. But when we have the audacity to dream in public, when we begin to unleash imagination and turn it into action, we can move the world.

As an Emissary, you’ll invite people to imagine the world they wish to live in, then help them connect imagination to action. It’s creative, fun, and effective.

Emissaries receive a free step-by-step toolkit full of creative activities and tips, access to online training and 1-1 assistance, and the opportunity to put their Imagination Station (and all that it yields) on the map, connecting local visions to a national dialogue. You can sign up** to host an Imagination Station as an individual or as a group/organization.

*The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture is not an official government agency. It is a people-powered movement dedicated to cultivating empathy, equity, and social imagination. http://usdac.us ** The deadline to sign up for this action is September 10, but we encourage you to sign up now so that you have ample time to plan for awesomeness and impact.

Today I want to take a moment to toast arts educator, activist, and philosopher Maxine Greene, who passed away last week at the age of 96. For decades, Maxine has been tireless in helping us to understand the transformative potential of arts experiences, whether as a professor at Columbia University; as Philosopher-in-Residence at the Lincoln Center Institute; or as founder of the Maxine Greene Center for Social Imagination, the Arts, and Education. She has left behind numerous books and essays showcasing her inspiring vision of humanization and justice.

Cartoon by Jarod Rossello, http://www.jarodrosello.com

Maxine argued that in order to create a more just, humane world we first must develop our poetic and social imaginations. The poetic imagination, according to Greene, is the capacity to see the world through the eyes of another. When we use our poetic imagination we are able not only to appreciate another’s worldview, but also to “enter into that world, to discover how it looks and feels from the vantage point of the person whose world it is.” This empathic practice does not necessarily entail agreeing with another’s perspective. However, it does enable us to “grasp it as a human possibility.”

The social imagination allows us to envision a life different from the one we live, to “look at the world as if it could be otherwise.” It is the human capacity, both creative and moral, to “invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficient society, on the streets where we live, in our schools.” While not inherently geared toward justice, the social imagination makes positive social change possible because a vision of what might be gives us a perspective from which to critique things as they are. As Greene states, “We acknowledge the harshness of situations only when we have in mind another state of affairs in which things would be better…and it may be only then that we are moved to choose to repair or renew.”

This, I think, is the central job of cultural organizing: to enhance our collective poetic and social imaginations. As Jeff Chang tells us, any successful social change effort requires a “collective leap of imagination.” Our charge is to facilitate this leap. And Maxine — through her writing and teaching, through her Foundation and her example — has blazed quite the trail for us. Thank you.

For a great tribute to Maxine, check out this comic by Nick SousanisQuotes from:
Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.